Tips and Hints for New Players
This list of hints and tips for new players was originally provided by Razorgirl; however, it was removed for unexplained reasons. The original content has been preserved. '' This is a quick and nasty list of hints and tips for new players. There are a lot of Guides around with a heap of information, but this can be intimidating (TL;DR?) for new players. I'm not one for reading instructions, so anything longer than a quick list of do X and Y and don't do Z was not something I was interested in. So, this is a list for new players that just want some quick tips, without having to read War and Peace. '''1. Upgrade your Counting House' Upgrade this Building as much as you can, as soon as you can. This should be the first thing that you max out. I like to start with Silver Bars, as that means more silver quickly, while you're sitting down playing. Before you leave the game to go do something else, make sure that you have increased your Counting Houses' maximum capacity. This will mean that your time away from the game will allow the game to have a larger reserve of silver waiting for you when you return. 2. Upgrade your Village Center Upgrade it as much as you can, as fast as you can, but give priority to your Counting House. Upgrade your Village Center so that you can produce Grain, Wood and Fish as quickly as possible. These are needed for Bread and Mead, which will help you to do things faster. 3. Get Hitched Get your character married as soon as you can, to a player that has been playing a long time. When you get Married you can send your Spouse Bacon or Ale once per day (and they can send it to you once a day). Bacon and Ale help you to complete Quests and build Building Upgrades faster. 4. Get the Brewhouse ASAP This is a Building Upgrade in the Village Center. It will cost 10 Gold, but this will allow you to produce more than multiples of each time you assign Production. I cannot give enough emphasis to how awesome it is to be able to produce 2, 3 up to 6 of any one Common Resource at a time, rather than just 1 at a time. 5. Figure Out What Your Long Term Goal Is What do you want out of this game. Some people are happy to play the one House all the way through to the end. Others wish to reincarnate through all the Fealties as quickly as possible before returning to the one they want to play long term. Knowing what you want for the long term can be very important for planning where you want your game to go, and how to get there. 6. Figure out if Achievements and Titles are Important to You ... Or if you just want to play out your character's story based on what fits your idea of your character rather than which stat will receive a boost. Each Background has a Title that you can gain if you achieve a high score with certain Alignments - which alignment depends on each Background. So if this sort of thing is important to you, check what you need now. 7. Lots of Cheap Sworn Swords are Better than one Peerless Sworn Sword Early on, it's about quantity not quality. This is doubly so if you intend to reincarnate. More Sworn Swords will mean that you can complete more Quests and more Adventures faster. This will allow you to progress in the game. There is no maximum number of Sworn Swords that you can have, however you can't send out more Sworn Swords on Adventures and Player to Player Actions (PtP) than you have Command Points. As you progress in the game and get more experience, you will discover that you will want to send as many Sworn Swords as you can out on Barter PtP actions with members of your Alliance, or to beat up on low-level inactive friends in your Friends Bar. The reason for this is that you need to win 400 PtP Actions (defenses no longer count) in order to get the Obsidian Dagger. Trust me, it rocks. You'll want one. By all means, get your Peerless Sworn Swords later on down the track. But when you're just starting out you will progress a LOT faster with ten Common Sworn Swords than one Peerless. 8. Always Equip Your Character with Your Best Troop and Items Your Character's stats stack with ALL your Sworn Swords, so it is far more efficient to give your best items to your Character so that the Stat Bonus will convey to all your Sworn Swords. 9. Don't get distracted by the "Bonus Goals" It's not worth holding off progressing on to the next chapter just for a Bonus Item that is probably not worth it anyway. Sometimes it might be worth it, depending on the time and the item (e.g. Obsidian Dagger or the Valyrian Steel Dagger), but most of the time it won't be. You're far better off progressing through the story and then sweeping back through your Quest Journal later on and picking up all the Bonus Goals that you've completed long after you completed the Chapter (this wasn't working for a long time, but now that it is, I've added it back in). 10. Building Upgrades are Better than Items Building Upgrades will increase your character's Stats, which in turn is added to all your Sworn Swords for Quests, Adventures, and Player to Player Actions. Upgrades also give you Power, which means that you will level faster, which means more Talents and Unlocking higher level Buildings. 11. Be an Uncommon Friend When you send Favors (Daily Gifts) to your Friends and Allies, there will be an array of Boons that you can chose to send. Common Boons (Grey) only add 3% to a specific Specialization (Fight, Barter, Spy, etc), whereas the MediaWiki:Badtitletext (Green) will give a 7% bonus to a whole stat (e.g. Fight, Harass AND Aid). Some Uncommon Boons will only give a boost to Attack, others will give a boost to Defense, and some will give a boost to both. Obviously, you want to give (and thus be more likely to receive) the Boons that give people the most options, so regardless of which stat it boosts, always send the Uncommon Boon that gives a boost to Attack AND Defense if you can. If you can't, don't sweat it, but do it if you can. 12. Bread ... Bread... and MOAR BREAD!!! Bread will decrease the time it takes to complete a Quest or an Adventure by 30 minutes. This means getting more silver and more resources faster (which is kinda offset by the cost to produce the Bread in the first place), but more importantly it will progress you through the story faster. Bread, like other Food is a Consumable, which means that they won't be lost during Reincarnation. Ideally, you want to be making bread non-stop at your Sept. 13. Mead!!! More Mead!!! Mead speeds up the time it takes to build Building Upgrades, this means more Power, which means increasing in Level faster, which means more Talents, but most importantly of all, it means unlocking Buildings faster. When you start out, you should be doing what you can to race to Level 13, as this is the level that unlocks the Fealty Buildings and that means having two buildings producing Resources rather than just one. It also means less time building Upgrades and thus more time getting your buildings to make Items. 14. Join an Alliance that is Willing to Help You Some Alliances have created Wiki pages to promote who they are. The List of Alliances page allows for Alliances to indicate if they are willing to help new players. It's important to find an Alliance that has a similar play style to you. There is no point in joining a "Peace Love and Mung Bean" Alliance if you are an aggressive, "Death to the Enemy" player - and vice versa. An Alliance can help you knock over Boss Challenges quickly, and thus progress in the game faster. You will also be able to participate in Alliance Challenges, which for the most part will mean getting access to Uncommon Resources. Some Alliances go out of their way to help new players, but not all of them do. Some are super competitive - which isn't a bad thing, it's just important to know what you're getting into. When you do join an Alliance, make sure that you pull your weight and contribute items to the Alliance Challenges - but make sure that you're not being taken advantage of, and are contributing items and seeing little in return. Again, this comes down to making sure that you join the Alliance that is right for you. If you don't think you're in a place that is a good match for you, check out the Alliances page and see if there's somewhere that might be better suited for you. 15. Participate in Other People's Boss Challenges and Alliance Challenges Even if it looks like you're not contributing! Every time your Sworn Sword makes an Action in a Boss Quest (BQ) or Alliance Challenge (AC), Your Character gets experience. Ideally, you'll want to get your Alliance to help you finish your Boss Challenges quickly so that you can progress through the story, but the more BQs and ACs you participate in, the more experience your Character will get, thus the faster you will increase in level, which gives you more Command Points to do more things, and more Talents to do those things better. 16. Enjoy the story The story is the whole point of the game. If you just click open Quests and click the selection that gives you an Alignment boost, then the game won't be as fun, since the stories are the whole point of the game. Also, Quests = Silver = able to do more stuff (buy cool items, Sworn Swords, Upgrades, etc). Once you've played through and gotten the hang of things, you may decide that you want to go through Reincarnation and to play through with a different Fealty. If so, you may want to check out my guide to Burning through Reincarnation. Which brings us to... 17. Before You Reincarnate, Get a Headstart with Silver If you have permanent Sworn Swords and you plan to Reincarnate, send every one of them on a Barter PtP mission just before you Reincarnate. When you start living a new life, those permanent SS you sent out will bring you some extra silver when they return back home. Their actions will not show up in your PtP window, nor will their actions count towards your PtP wins, but you still get the silver. This will only work with permanent SS though. Of course, if you just want to play and have fun, that's cool too. RG : )